This is part 3 of my series of startup ideas. Part 1 and Part 2 received decent response, though I am yet to hear if they sound reasonable or not.

Personalized technology tracker/Search Engine

This is something, I have personally wanted to do. But me being lazy, not able to get started on this.

I like RSS because I can check the contents whenever I want. I like dzone, because it makes me learn something new in my technology. But subscribing to RSS of all sites like dzone and manually categorizing/prioritizing them is a tough task and most of the time, people tend to ignore good contents.

Let me take an example. I recently started hacking grails. Now I need a mechanism to categorize contents from sites like dzone into Articles, Tips, Code Snippets, New Developer tools related to grails etc. There should be a way to rate contents. Like articles coming directly from Grails developers, should get higher ranking. Now this entire site has to be personalized. Which means I decide the rating, categories etc. But the site should suggest me new sources, based on what others are using.

Obvious advantage of this is that the site now becomes my own personalized vertical search engine for my technology. Add the ability to crawl forums, then you have a perfect Vertical technology Search Engine.

Starting this new year by giving away some of the ideas that I have. Hope is that someone will refine them and come up with a good business plan. Alternatively, I am also willing to discuss with the interested junta. Ok, without making you all wait any further, here are some of the ideas for free.

Idea #1 Contextual print ad

Am I kidding here? Nope. Even ads in newspapers could be contextual. Infact they are. Have you seen articles like “SME market booming in india” in your newspaper and down the line a cute bank ad promising bigger loans to SMEs? That is contextual for you. Right now, those ads are acquired through means like phones, direct marketing. Why not build a site around this service. Make it easy for publishers and advertisers to communicate at the same time maintain privacy, so that some other publisher will not able to plagiarize and publish similar content? The same logic could be extended for Magazines also!

Idea #2 Community based job portal

Most of the companies offer referral fee to employees. When an employee refers someone, obviously that will have more weightage than a referral made by a job consultant. Why not build a community around this idea? People could post something about their company’s requirements along with some additional tit bits like pay package that could be expected, onsite opportunities, may be about the idle period (bench :)). Interested people could forward their resume. This is kinda like forum + job search. Now there are interesting monetizing opportunities here, which I don’t want to reveal. (Why should I?). If you are smart enough, figure out yourself! I know that there are lot of players even in this arena. But none of them got kicked off.

Based on the response for this post, I will be posting more ideas in parts. Don’t forget to leave your comments.